2022 seem to be the most transformative year in the history of the product management. It is an exciting time that has a lot of businesses looking to apply Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning and Augmented Reality in every industry. By investing and building products in these frontier technologies, companies across the World will be able to set themselves up as market leaders well beyond 2022.
Five of America’s biggest firms, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft (MAAMA) together have invested $149bn in search for the next big transformative change in 2021 (The Economist, 2022 Jan 22). A lot of this spending is in product development with the focus on the “frontier technologies”: metaverse, autonomous cars, health care, space, robotics, fintech, crypto and quantum computing. The graph depicts acquisitions (majority stakeholder) and investments (minority stakeholder) by the big 5 tech:
Alphabet was the biggest spender–with acquisition of DeepMind, Clustree and Magic Leap in the novel frontier technologies. Google has made acquisitions in health care, autonomous cars and space technologies. Apple’s investment of $65bn has been in iPhone10, AR glasses, watch and wireless charging. Microsoft spent $66bn in acquisitions and investments in fintech, crypto, space and cloud computing. Amazon’s big spending was on drone delivery and drone technologies with a focus on autonomous drones to compete with Alphabet’s Project Wing. These acquisitions means more focus of product development in those areas.
Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have also invested heavily in robotics with the 2014 acquisition of Kiva Systems by Amazon for $775m followed by Apple’s $16bn purchase of Meta and Microsoft’s $3.5bn purchase of Atrias.
Google, Microsoft and Amazon have acquired key technology firms to strengthen their cloud business and AI capabilities. Google’s acquisition of Deep Mind is expected to strengthen its search capacity with better speech recognition, vision and natural language processing which will be integrated into its products. Google has also acquired DNNresearch for neural networks, Moodstocks for facial recognition, Wavii for natural language processing and Agnilux for machine vision research.
The other prove that the Big Five is looking at those areas are their employees Linkedin profiles:
Of note, evidence that not just the Big Five are expanding into those areas, but pretty much every top tier company known for their excellent product processes. For example, Apple has over 100 product managers in areas such as VR games, 360 degrees video and AR applications for mobile and desktop platforms; for the sake of scale just imagine Microsoft has around 17K PMs working from hardware to software products and many more like Google, Facebook and Tesla have product managers in these areas of robotics, metaverse, fintech, cars, crypto and quantum computing.
Product Managers in the Big Five based onLinkedin Jobs Associates — UK. as per 2022 feb 18:
- About 20'000 PMs Amazon
- About 17'000 PMs Google
- About 17'000 PMs Microsoft + Open Source
- About 8'300 PMs @Apple
- About 5'500 PMs Meta
And when Market Capitalizaiton is added to the picture, one can see where product managers bringist biggest value:
Whether it’s a giant new market or not, the fact that most of the Big Five are expanding into product management is good news. The future is certainly brighter for product management jobs and the spectrum of products we’ll be using.
